Thursday, November 16, 2006

This land isn't your land

Missed this for a ten days, but on election night David Byrne, Talking Heads front man and general public intellectual of Lower East Side-style culture, posted one of those meandering but thoughtful mini-essays that blogs were known for before they began to be co-opted as a genre by journalism (pot, meet kettle) and corporations. OK, Byrne's opening is really odd. But in any case he had seen some early returns and noticed that the Democrats had "at least taken a few seats back, maybe enough to give them a majority."

Immediately he says, "I sang 'This Land Is Your Land' to myself as I rode my bike downtown -- I got choked up and started to cry." Don't you love our hipster poet? But it turns out he was thinking of just what would not change even in a radical election turnover. His analysis is of a certain culture that has flourished of late but isn't really political. It's worth quoting at length, even if it's a bit teary-eyed:

Push in line, build your building right in front of someone else’s, destroy a neighborhood, be a winner, a survivor. To me, those reality shows 'teach' bully culture -- that’s the lesson that is imparted -- and that includes ones like Laguna Beach, which seems to promote backstabbing, lying, duplicitous behavior and entitlement -- all in a world where no one works.

He closes with a prescient observation that gained resonance the very next day: "Rummy and the others have proven that they are incompetent and are jeopardizing the lives of thousands if not hundreds of thousands."

Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:02 PM

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